The Google Code blog announced today the debut of yet another developer resource, this one focused entirely on making Internet browsing "as fast as turning the pages of a magazine."
The new site will be all about performance, "from Internet protocols to the browser to website development." When the Web is faster, the apps are faster; those idealist Googlers seem to think we should be browsing through pages, running complex apps, viewing enormous images, and streaming HD movies without delays or lag time of any kind.
The year was 2013. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg was still the social network's public persona, but he had a young family and new-found loves of world travel, exotic regional cocktails and faux-native art. Facebook had become overgrown with spammy apps and awkwardly targeted advertisements. The company quietly gave Zuckerberg a huge salary to pursue those other interests and leave product development and the business in the hands of other people. There was no denying it - Facebook was on the decline as Social Network XYZ rose to global social networking supremacy.
But what in this future scenario will Social Network XYZ be? As the sands of time wash MySpace into obscurity, with a wave of hundreds of employees being let go this week for example, now seems like a good time to think about what comes next. What could kill Facebook, the MySpace killer? We've identified four possible scenarios - which do you think is most likely? Most desirable?
On July 1, the Chinese government will be rolling out censorship software on every new computer sold in the country. The software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, is intended to block pornography and possibly filter politically disruptive material, all while quietly gathering private user data.
One man in particular is staging a protest against the censorship: He is calling for everyone in China to abandon the Internet on the day the new rule takes effect. According to GlobalPost, Beijing artist and prominent political critic Ai Weiwei wants other Chinese citizens to realize their own power.
According to a new study from Nielsen, Internet users spend more time on social networks and blogs in May 2009 than ever before. The total number of minutes increased 82% year-over-year. Unsurprisingly, Twitter saw the largest gain in total new users among social networks, with a 1,448% increase in visitors from May 2008 to May 2009. Users also started to spend far more time on Twitter in recent months. In May 2008, the average user spent about 6 minutes on Twitter.com, while this number has now grown to more than 17 minutes (Note: as far as we can see these numbers don't seem to take users who use third-party clients into account).
It is important to note, though, that Twitter's growth has slowed down dramatically over the last two months, as both the time per person spent on the site and Twitter's month-over-month growth only increased slightly since April 2009.
Feedinvader is an interesting Firefox plugin that combines an online feed reader with a news ticker right underneath your bookmarks bar. The feed reader in the back-end is currently mostly for managing the feeds in the ticker, but with a bit of additional work, it could also become a great reader in its own right.
The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story's excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.
Now that iPhone's new OS 3.0 is available with all its nifty features like spotlight search, copy and paste, push notifications and maybe one day MMS and tethering, many users have happily upgraded their devices. For most people, upgrading to the new OS is as technical as they want to get. For others, however, a true upgrade isn't complete until the jailbreak is done.
After waiting for a few days, the fabulous iPhone dev team at last provided us with a new set of jailbreaking tools. If you're ready to dive in, you can use this guide to get going. And unlike some of the other guides on the net, we'll share our personal experience and tips so you know just what you're getting into...and what to avoid.
ThisMoment is a new media-sharing site (see our previous coverage) which lets you post photos and videos in a slideshow format while also sharing them across the web to sites like Facebook and Twitter. Part microblog, part social network, and part sharing platform, thisMoment's goal goes beyond simply providing a place to store and share your media. In other words, it's not just a Twitter clone with pictures. Instead, this beautifully crafted site is designed to allow you to share media that has meaning to you - the special moments that will in turn create a "digital reflection" of your life.
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Shortly after Montenegro gained independence in June of 2006, the ISO 3165 Maintenance Agency assigned the emerging nation the country code "ME." By submitting an application to the IANA to have .Me designated as the country's top-level domain (TLD), the Government of Montenegro took its most important step in establishing .Me. The designation was finally approved and took place in September 2007.
A co-sponsored initiative from Microsoft Bing and Gnomedex will give incentive to developers working on economy- or ecology-themed apps this summer.
The Will Code for Green contest calls for submissions that help "deal with the worsening global economy or... improve the ecology of the planet Earth." Two $10,000 grand prize winners and three $3,000 runner-up prizes will be announced at the 2009 Gnomedex technology conference, which takes place August 20-22, 2009, in Seattle, Washington. There is a catch: Entries must use Bing APIs. But is that catch really so bad or unexpected? Gnomedex (and blog network Lockergnome) founder, Chris Pirillo, doesn't think so.
Just this morning, our own Sarah Perez wondered if Apple wasn't ready for push notifications yet, as only a few push enabled apps had made it into the App Store so far, but as is so often the case in our business, only a few hours later Apple first allows the AIM instant messenger (iTunes link) into the store, and now BeejiveIM (iTunes link), a multi-network IM app that was extensively demoed at Apple's developer conference two weeks ago, has also arrived in the App Store as well. We are still waiting for a number of other apps with support for push to be allowed into the store, but it clearly looks like Apple has now opened the floodgates and more apps will probably follow soon.
